A slashing attack on Dr. Harry H. Laughlin’s recent recommendation to the New York State Chamber of Commerce urging that it refuse to approve the lifting of immigration bars to permit German refugee Jews to enter this country featured the morning session of an all-day conference of the American Jewish Congress, held yesterday at the Hotel Edison. More than 1,500 delegates, representing affiliated and independent Jewish organizations, attended.
The conference had been called by the American Jewish Congress for the purpose of discussing major problems confronting the Jews of the United States and abroad, and to formulate plans for their solution. Organizations represented included labor, fraternal, beneficial, social, religious, communal and Zionist districts.
The attack on Dr. Laughlin, who is connected with the Department of Eugenics at the Carnegie Institute of Washington, was made by Aldermanic President Bernard S. Deutsch, president of the Congress, in his address of welcome to the delegates.
Characterizing the Laughlin report as a “knavish, deliberate slur upon the whole Jewish people,” Deutsch charged that it “carries all the earmarks of an attempt to introduce a racial passport system in the United States, based on the Nazi model.”
“For years we in this country have been lulled into a false sense of security,” Deutsch declared. “We have regarded ourselves as a people apart, not subject to misfortunes and tragedies of the kind endured by our fellow Jews across the seas.
“In this concept we resembled the Jews of Germany who believed their prestige, their civilization, their contribution to Germany’s repute rendered them immune from any serious assault upon their position.
“It is unnecessary here to expatiate on the fallacy of that view or to describe the dreadful tragedy of German-Jewry which is being hung by the noose of the ‘Aryan’ paragraph.
“We have lived to see the attempt being made to introduce the ‘Aryan’ paragraph in these United States. A new and spurious race purification theory, similar to that of the Nazis, under which the Jews are singled out for attack and segregation is now being developed in this country.
RACE SELECTION
“I call your attention to the ‘white standard of race selection’ advanced by Dr. Laughlin. Dr. Laughlin’s ‘purification of race theory,’ is as dangerous and as spurious as the purified ‘Aryan’ race theories advanced by the Nazis, to which it bears suspicious resemblance.
“His singling out of the Jews for mention as a particular race group to be barred from general admission to the United States, despite the condescending tribute to so-called ‘superior’ Jews is a knavish, deliberate slur upon the whole Jewish people, which differs only from the Nazi brand in that it is couched in more political language.
To face the threat implied in this anti-Semitic move, which he described as the more dangerous for its subtlety, as well as the other anti-Jewish assaults, the American Jewish Congress chief urged the “classes and masses” of Jews in this country to “close their ranks” and “act together to save themselves.”
A call to “boycott Nazi-Germany to save humanity” was the keynote of an address made at the morning session of the conference by Dr. Joseph Tenenbaum, chairman of the boycott committee of the American Jewish Congress.
“The Waterloo of Hitlerism,” Dr. Tenenbaum said, “will come on the battleground of economics and it is the economic issue which will deliver the blow of mercy to the Nazi regime.”
Pointing out that the boycott has become world-wide, and that its first year has brought Germany “on the brink of bankruptcy,” Dr. Tenenbaum expressed the hope that the American government would not accede to Hitler’s request for a loan which would be used directly in an effort to break the boycott.
Other speakers included Dr. Stephen S. Wise, Professor Horace M. Kallen, Professor Jerome Michael, Dr. K. Vornberof (whose speech was read by Oscar Leonard), Nathan D. Perlman, and Louis Segal. Committee reports were read by Mrs. Stephen S. Wise, Dr. Benjamin Jolons and Emanuel H. Sonnenreich.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
